This thesis examines the entangled relationships of humans, waves, and the wider nonhuman environment in surfing. It is based on an ethnographic study of surfing along the Atlantic coast of Ireland, and also on how these communities are tied to a global surfing imaginary via online magazines, digital swell forecasts, and international travel. The argument at the core of this thesis is that surfing describes a collection of practices which transforms humans into channels for Oceanic energy. This becoming is both what allows the human body and technology to make lives as surfers in the littoral environment, and also produces the practical context whereby Irish terrestrial sociality is transformed into Irish surfer sociality with its own rules, hierarchies, and environmental understandings. The thesis departs from established tendencies in anthropology, geography and popular literature to theorise the coast as a liminal/peripheral space that is distinct from 'everyday' life and in which social norms are relaxed, transformed or perhaps even absent. Instead, I develop an alternative ecological analysis of Irish surfing using surfers' own concepts which examines how surfing practice refigures the coast as the centre of certain human lives while at the same time blurring conceptual and physical boundary lines which separate land, littoral and ocean. By going beyond a strictly materialist approach to examine the energies which animate material relations, the ecological explanation developed herein argues that an anthropological explanation of surfing social relations benefits from a thorough understanding of the various ways that people become affectively tied to environments through practice.

The thesis explores varying notions and practices of sustainability through a focus on the relationship between management of a heritage site, the Ifugao Rice Terraces and the implementation of the Ambangal Mini-hydro Plant, a small-scale hydro-electric power initiative in Ifugao Province. In doing so, I address the politics of resource governance. Likewise, rather than just a mere translation of 'sustainability' in local vernacular or an identification of sustainable practices, I instead elaborate upon how people conceptualise and practice the principles which underpin sustainability. As such, I consider the commonly promoted definition of sustainability as the undertaking of community development without compromising social and natural resources for future generations. Thus, the thesis presents Ifugao conceptualisation and practices regarding stewardship and prosperity. Specifically, I elaborate upon the Ifugao's kinship system, agricultural activities, and well-being rituals, and relate these practices with how people currently deliberate heritage and development interventions transpiring in the province. The aim is to more explicitly link spiritual and technical activities in anthropological approaches to sustainability. As the thesis argues, integral to community members' concern for the well-being of people across generations is the plurality of possibilities, not simply the achievement of particular outcomes or a preoccupation with stability. Thus, I describe local understandings and enactment of sustainability as 'capacity- expansion' and discuss this in relation to the often deployed term, 'capacitybuilding' in sustainable development practices. In Ifugao understanding of sustainability, what is particularly salient is how community members articulate issues regarding the linked potential of people and places to arise in multiple possibilities. Therefore, the thesis delves into theoretical approaches in potentiality along with current insights on socio-ecological resilience to expound on what such discussions can contribute to an anthropology of sustainability.

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This thesis explores the power structures which shape Chinese medicine in the United States. Chinese medicine had two incarnations: migrant Chinese practice and its professionalized form. From the 1880s to the 1940s, Chinese medicine was practiced by the Chinese diaspora to serve their communities and non-Chinese settler populations. From the 1970s onward, Chinese medicine professionalized under the agency of acupuncture. Through the regulation of acupuncture, groups of predominately white Americans began to create standards of practice based on the enactment of what I have referred to as “orientalized biopower.” Orientalized biopower is the process where America’s predominately white counterculture began to encompass an orientalism which romanticized a form of Chinese medicine constructed in the 1950s by the People’s Republic of China called Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). With the adoption of TCM in the United States, they also formulated measures which marginalized Asian Americans practitioners. The profession then labelled itself as “Oriental Medicine” embodying Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism. Along with this form of orientalism, the counterculture used the State to push for a standardized epistemology of TCM. In return, the State encompassed standardized Chinese medicine as element of biopower. My research is informed by a cross-country ethnography of schools, regulatory bodies, and private practices around North America. Through my investigation, I discover the power structures of Chinese medicine, contained within the regulatory bodies and schools, are mostly dominated by white Americans. Combined, they construct a profession and determine the “legitimate” and “illegitimate” forms of Chinese medicine, which constitutes the criteria for who can and cannot practice legally in the country.

This thesis investigates the evolving nature of the illness experience of HIV-positive women in Chennai as they redefine their concepts of self, community and health in light of their interactions with a local HIV clinic. It is through their ongoing relationships with the other patients and staff members within the Clinic that this thesis examines the state of liminality experienced by participants while they move through the different stages of their illness experience. In particular, their interactions and opinions at each stage of coming to terms with their diagnosis are discussed with regards to the concept of personal agency and the relationship this has to overall health and wellbeing. The thesis has three main areas of concern. The first explores the role that culturally-based stigmas and traditional schemas of women’s positions within the family have in creating specific health-related vulnerabilities among these women. The second area of concern attends to the role of the family and the ability of HIV/AIDS diagnosis to alter the expectations of the sick role among individuals and family members. The experiences of stigma and fear discussed by participants highlight the redefining of what constitutes health and point to a definition of community that is expanded to include Clinic staff and other HIV-positive individuals while maintaining relationships with family and friends wherein HIV status is concealed and denied. The third area of concern continues this theme by exploring the actions of the Clinic staff and their ability to enter this expanded community definition by taking on roles traditionally held by family members while battling against the negative experiences patients have had at other medical facilities. Ultimately, this thesis details the intimate relationships experienced by these individuals and the Clinic staff at the intersection of traditional social values and the modern condition of HIV/AIDS.

Earth’s natural forest coverage is declining at the same time as government, forestry, and development sectors are looking to forests to meet energy needs, mitigate climate change, and provide food and water security. This is a case study of Loita Forest located in southern Kenya’s semi-arid drylands. The Loita area is a contemporary hotbed of competing interests in communal dry season grazing, biodiversity conservation, timber, and watershed protection. Very little is known about land change in Loita or cultural linkages accompanying it. The study uses gender to examine the intersections of three conceptual spheres of inquiry—culture, livelihood, and environment. To confirm gender linkages empirically, it establishes baselines in history and traces cultural and environmental change over four decades. Its methods are triangulated between remote sensing, oral histories, interviews, focus groups, and participatory resource mapping and transect walks. The findings present a new empirically-based understanding about the gender dimensions of land change. Dramatic declines in dense forest were evident along with transformations in gendered livelihood roles and intra-household and community decision-making. Wetland change dynamics indicate synergies and feedbacks with livelihood shift and underlying abiotic drivers. The thesis argues that change in this natural forest ecosystem involves a complex web of intersecting variabilities that include gender—a cultural factor that has not received much attention in studies trying to integrate natural and social sciences to understand remotely sensed land change. The results will fuel discourse about the historical basis of Maasai women’s social status by carrying it forth into the 21st century with recent changes in livelihood roles and women’s self-perceptions. It concludes with guidelines for gender-inclusive resource planning in the Maasai landscape.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis presents an in-depth, long-term ethnographic study of the lives of street musicians in the Koenji neighbourhood of Tokyo. My interlocutors moved to the metropolis to begin lives as musicians: to become music professionals, to gain fans and popularity, to dare to do what they cared most about, and in doing so, to follow a musical dream. There has, however, never been a worse time to be a young aspiring artist. The Japanese music industry today is deaf to all but the most celebrated bands and musicians, fewer artists gain industry support every year, and many live venues charge performers to play on stage. As financially insecure and opportunity-poor irregular workers, my participants took to the walkways around Koenji train station in search of a place to play, to be seen, and to connect with the passing crowds. Their incursions into rail spaces gave them access to an audience, but also gained the attention of police and station staff, and playing involved a continual process of managing their noise and their visibility. Prioritising music put them on the margins of popular discourses of life trajectories in Japan, and as time progressed their dreams of 'making it' began to fade. I ask why they continued to perform regularly at the station despite their increasing awareness of this, and what role remained for street music in their lives. I uncover how their music practices negotiated the space left by diminished hope, and explore how they found new meanings of 'a life in music'. Their journeys took a different route to those which they had envisioned before arriving in Tokyo, but nevertheless offered a sense of direction, momentum, and an understanding of who they were in relation to the crowds that passed them on the street.

In the face of rampant food safety scandals and environmental pollution affecting the Chinese food supply, a new breed of farmer has appeared in China: Middle-class farmers who gave up white collar jobs in the city to return to peri-urban farmland to grow produce without using synthetic fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides and without organic certification. The farmers' produce has potential to be both a lucrative solution to the problem of food safety and also a means to build an alternative future for the farmers themselves and those who share their passion for their produce. Through participant-observing the way these farmers sell their produce, I shed light on the farmers' views on consumers, the strategies that they use to attract potential customers and who they choose to collaborate with to sell their produce and why. I show how these farmers are seeking to create a social world with their customers that is an alternative to the consumerist society based on instrumental and utilitarian relations that much of middle-class China inhabits. The farmers' goals are reflected in their judgments of potential customers, and the challenges that they face when they engage with different collaborators from activists to businessmen and marketing and public relations executives in order to sell produce. The different practices of the farmers compared to their collaborators in selling their produce are indicative of different views of modernity - either as an alternative to consumerism, a continuation of conventional capitalistic modernity or a combination of both. The farmers' navigation of different visions of modernity and their aspirations to build an alternative social world shows that growing and then selling ecological produce is an ongoing challenge of negotiation between often contradicting beliefs about Chinese society and China's path of modernity.